Worth the Nightmares
by Glorious Clio
Summary: Harry has been plagued by nightmares his entire life, but he doesn't hold the monopoly on them.  HPxGW, spoilers for Deathly Hallows.  For musical-penguins.


Title: Worth the Nightmares  
>Rating: T<br>Summary: Harry has been plagued by nightmares his entire life, but he doesn't hold the monopoly on them. HPxGW, spoilers for Deathly Hallows.

Disclaimer: I do not hold any ownership over the JK Rowling's impossibly brilliant universe.  
>Author's Note: I've never written HarryGinny before, my usual universe is Robin Hood… so…. Yeah. It's really, really short. Hopefully I did okay. Leave a review to let me know. Thanks to musical-penguins for cleaning up my act. This is dedicated to her.

"_Ginny, who was huddled in her corner looking nearly as bad as Harry felt, gave a small sob; Hermione went over and put a comforting arm around her. _

""_But didn't any of you – fall off your seats?" said Harry awkwardly._

""_No," said Ron, looking anxiously at Harry again. "Ginny was shaking like mad though….""_

_Prisoner of Azkaban, (pg 86, First American Edition). _

o0O0o

Ginny Potter nee` Weasley woke with a start, breathing heavily as if she had been running so fast… so far…. It took her a moment to realize where she was. Slowly, reality came back to her.

She was in bed, Harry was next to her.

Furthermore, she was in their new little house (little might be stretching it, the house had four bedrooms). Mum had eyed the four bedrooms with suspicion and a little hope, but Ginny wasn't in quite so big of a hurry to fill them. She still wanted to play Qudditch for the Harpies for a few more years, and planning a wedding and buying a house were stressful enough without thinking about kids. They had a bedroom made up for when Teddy visited, but he rarely stayed the night at their house.

It was two days after Christmas, and she and Harry had been married for four months.

After the last battle, Harry and Ginny, almost without discussion, found themselves holding hands constantly. They dated, they "courted," they laughed, and they cried together. And when they shared a bed, they battled the nightmares together. Mostly they were Harry's nightmares, but sometimes Ginny had trouble sleeping too.

She reached over to the bedside table and fumbled for her wand. Wordlessly she lit the end of it and stumbled over to the old fashioned dressing table. She lit a few candles and began running a brush through her hair, watching herself in the mirror.

Ginny was reluctant to talk to Harry about it - he had enough troubles to shoulder. But the truth of the matter was, she had been possessed by Tom Riddle her first year. That was not something Ginny would ever forget.

The fear. Something was going on at Hogwarts, the place that was supposed to be safer than her own bed. The terrifying suspicion, and later, realization that she was a part of whatever was going on. The rumors, the speculation…. The isolation and the guilt at harboring her secret. The pain when others said the perpetrator would be "chucked out." No trial, no jury. Just expulsion. Justice is swift.

Tom Riddle had manipulated her, used her, and controlled her body and her mind, making her an instrument to attack her own schoolmates.

She had tried to be strong, she tried to turn a corner when she chucked the diary into the girls' toilet and fled the bathroom. But it had turned up again, in Harry's hands of all places. And she knew of Riddles desire to get close to Harry. She had to protect him. And herself. If Harry had found out that she was controlling Slytherin's monster… well, he might have had her chucked out without knowing the whole story.

All of this manifested itself in Ginny's nightmares; they were always the same. She was wand-less and wordless, wandering trance-like into a dark cavern, following a long red snake. The cavern went deeper into the earth. She couldn't see anything, couldn't remember anything. There were no sensations in these nightmares, just one of fear and the feel of the jagged rocks under her palms as she used her hands to guide herself along the long corridors of rock. As she got further into the cavern, she would realize that there was a liquid running down the sides of the walls and over the ground. It was warm, sticky, and Dream-Ginny knew it was blood.

Sometimes she reached the end of the cavern and Tom Riddle was there himself, tall and handsome; ridiculing her, pulling out her deepest fears, her greatest weaknesses. Sometimes he had Harry, twelve year old Harry, locked in a giant birdcage.

After a while, she had learned to tell him "NO!" The shout would echo off the walls and then Dream-Ginny would turn and run, crawling and climbing and picking her way out of the cavern as fast as she could. Or she would try and kick the cage open to free Harry. It was usually around then that she woke up, sweating and panting. Like tonight.

A hundred strokes, though her bright red hair. Ginny hoped the repetitive act would relax her. (Mum had brushed her hair when she had nightmares as a child – nightmares about Gideon and Fabian Prewett, the uncles she had never met. They had left a vacuum in her life, one she could never explain and she had nightmares about her own brothers dying.)

She was about to start again when the brush slipped from her hand; it clattered on the table. Harry stirred and called, "Ginny?"

Ginny didn't answer, but turned around to face him. His hair was even more crumpled from sleep; he looked very tired as he slid his glasses on his face. The low candlelight played with his green eyes (as green as a fresh-pickled toad, she had once written in a Valentine, a singing Valentine which had led to her discovering Tom Riddle's diary in his possession).

Uncomfortable, she began braiding her hair.

"What's wrong?" he asked, concern lacing his voice.

"It's just a nightmare," she said, trying to dismiss the whole thing.

"It's obviously troubling you."

She fumbled around for a ribbon, which she tied around the plait. Harry patted the bed next to him and smiled. Ginny blew out the candles, dimmed the light on her wand and crawled into bed next to him. He put his glasses back on his bedside table and cuddled up next to her.

"You can tell me, you know. I know a thing or two about nightmares."

Harry wrapped his arms around her, and Ginny had a quick flash of insight into how lucky she actually was and how much she loved him. It wasn't just that the famous Harry Potter was her newly-wed husband. It was that he knew how she felt about things like this. He could relate to her on a level that no one else would be able to. Having a shadow hanging over your childhood, over your experiences…. Hers wasn't as long as his, but she was still an active player in the sequence of events.

"I've had this nightmare since first year- I'm sure you remember the Chamber of Secrets?"

She felt, rather than saw him nod.

"It's that same sense of… I'm lost, lost to the world, and to myself. There's blood on my hands, and I'm deep underground, and Riddle is there, taunting me. And even if I manage to escape, I know that the nightmare that will come back."

Harry was rubbing her back in rhythmic circles. "But you escape?"

"Sometimes," she said.

"Ginny, I wish I could make them go away, but it seems to me that your ability to escape your own nightmares says a lot about who you are. You don't let people get in your way, even Tom Riddle."

She held him tighter. "I just sometimes worry if… a bit of his soul lives in me, like he did in you. That's the last thing I want."

"I don't think he does, Gin."

"What makes you say that?"

"Well… you didn't get any of his abilities. You can't speak Parseltongue, and you couldn't look into his mind. Remember, my fifth year? Those visions I was having? You might have had them too." He drew circles on her back with the tips of his fingertips. The effect of the words and his touch relaxed her.

He shuddered, and Ginny knew he was thinking of his fifth year: the terrible nature of those visions, watching first her father's horrible snake-bite, and then being tricked into thinking Sirius was being tortured. Ginny knew full well that Harry still carried guilt that Sirius had died because Harry had been duped.

"And you don't have a dashing scar," he added as an afterthought.

"Thank you," she whispered.

"For what?"

"For talking some sense into me. I knew he wasn't really a part of me, but I was so young. I can't seem to shake the feelings."

Harry kissed her, so tenderly. She let go of the awful memories and focused solely on his lips pressed against hers.

"You probably never will," he said when the kiss ended, bringing her back to reality with a sharp jolt.

"Gosh, thanks." She swatted his shoulder and then wrapped her arm around his back again.

Harry chuckled. "It's not fair, but Dumbledore once told me that it's our ability to feel things that makes us human."

"He said that?"

"I'm… paraphrasing."

She laughed out loud. "Only you would quote Albus Dumbledore in bed to your wife."

Ginny couldn't see it, but she knew Harry was blushing. She kissed the end of his nose. "Who needs poetry, anyway?"

"Exactly," said Harry, rolling her under him and kissing her again. "Next time you have a nightmare, you can wake me up. I wake you up often enough."

She laced her right hand through his insane black hair. "Alright," she agreed, tugging his face down to her lips again.

It was moments like these that Ginny could not help thinking how her life now was well worth the occasional nightmare.


End file.
